Dick Cheney said this morning that “it’s good” the executive branch is still running counterterrorism surveillance operations, but he’s decidedly disappointed with how the president has talked about them and defended them. The president “ought to be able to stand up and say this is a righteous program,” Cheney said, but President Obama instead has run the program while claiming — most prominently in his speech at the National Defense University recently — that the War on Terror is coming to an end. On that, the former vice president said, “he’s just dead wrong . . . it’s not winding down.” In fact, “the area that’s safe harbor for terrorists . . . now runs all across North Africa” and “the threat’s bigger than ever,” Cheney told Fox News’s Chris Wallace.

Vice President Cheney said that the administration ruined its “credibility” through dishonesty over the events in Benghazi and the IRS targeting. “The guy has failed to be forthright and honest,” Cheney said. Thus, perhaps unsurprisingly, Cheney says, “I don’t pay a lot of attention to what Barack Obama says” about his counterterrorism policies, and “I’m obviously not a fan of the incumbent president.”